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King of the granola heads

William Hjortsberg JUBILEE HITCHHIKER The life and times of Richard Brautigan 864pp. Counterpoint. Paperback, $29.95; distributed in the UK by Perseus. £19.99.978 1 61902 105 1

Published: 29 April 2013

R
ichard Brautigan, the Love Generation’s prickly and whimsical poet-novelist,
died what the sheriff’s report termed an “unattended death” on September 16,
1984. Having committed suicide with one of his beloved Smith & Wesson
revolvers, Brautigan was not discovered in his home in Bolinas, California
until October 25, at which point he needed to be “scooped[ed] up with a
shovel”. Why did Brautigan, the author of bestselling, generation-defining
novels such as Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar,
die so alone? In Jubilee Hitchhiker, William Hjortsberg maps the
rocketing rise and disastrous decline of this most quixotic American author.

Born in 1935 to a single mother in Tacoma, Washington, Richard Gary Brautigan
was destined for a life on the fringes. He was even, at first, estranged
from his own name, his mother borrowing the surname Porterfield from one of
his many stepfathers. Unmoored from ancestry, Brautigan would always be a
self-mythologizer, complicating the biographer’s task, but in the early,
“Dick Porterfield” chapters of Jubilee Hitchhiker,
Hjortsberg disentangles events from their embellishments. “Imagination feeds
on the irrational”, he writes, and Brautigan’s young mind was given a steady
diet. The midcentury Pacific Northwest has the larger-than-life dimensions
of legend, complete with a near-apocalyptic flood, which the Porterfield
family was the last to escape, “watching the highway fold up behind them
‘like scrambled eggs’”.

After the deluge, Brautigan acquired his major trope: “Fishing consumed [his]
life”. With his towering height, white-blond, soup bowl haircut and
overalls, the young Brautigan resembled Tom Sawyer, “hitchhiking up the
McKenzie in the rain with a fly rod under his arm and a peanut butter
sandwich in his pocket”. Brautigan would always retain an anachronistic
quality. By the age of twelve, he was collecting cans, blackberries and
nightcrawlers to help the family make ends meet. In 1956, he hitchhiked down
to San Francisco and never saw or spoke to his family again.

In 1956, he hitchhiked down to San Francisco and never saw or spoke to his
family again Intending to pursue poetry, Brautigan arrived peculiarly
positioned in literary history. Although the right age, he was too out of
step to participate in the Beat movement, which had been given its voltage,
Hjortsberg writes, when Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at the Six Gallery on
October 7, 1955. In Brautigan’s view, the beatniks were “those grunion of
Grant Avenue who throw themselves up onto the cement”. Hjortsberg sees this
opinion as the hallmark of an exacting writer: Brautigan observed the Beats
“with the dispassionate distance of a lepidopterist studying butterfly
migrations”. Yet one observes the insecure, fledgling poet himself migrating
to gentler social climes, which the Beats simply couldn’t provide, Ginsberg
calling him a “neurotic creep”.

Brautigan’s early Frisco experience thus amounts to a classic underdog
narrative. It was difficult to stand out as the genuine article: the North
Beach community was replete with literary journals, some lasting only one
issue, and raucous open-mic readings, in which we glimpse the regrettable
birth of slam poetry. Eventually, Brautigan felt compelled to distance
himself from poets altogether, although, Hjortsberg argues, “Everything he
wrote remained essentially poetic, even when labeled short stories or
novels”. It was only when he made the switch from verse to prose, declaring,
“I don’t want to sit at the children’s table anymore”, that his career
finally gained momentum.

The transition was not merely textual. Brautigan fastidiously controlled each
novel’s jacket, typography, layout, and even promotional materials. Such
powers, rarely bestowed on any author, resulted in the Brautigan brand,
arguably more famous than anything in the books themselves. The cover photo
for Trout Fishing in America is exemplary: in front of the Benjamin
Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, Brautigan appears
like a Gold Rush prospector, his girlfriend at his side in style. For his
friend Keith Abbott, the photo displays “His open, cheerful, confident
expression . . . characteristic of his belief in his prospects, while his
blue work shirt displays the uniform of artistic poverty”. The increasingly
beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his covers, were
integral to his mystique.

The increasingly beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his
covers, were integral to his mystiqueAfter years of unsuccessfully
promoting his early novels, Brautigan finally intersected with the hippies.
His prose – loose, ebullient, hallucinatory – made him the ideal San
Franciscan successor to the more rigorous and existential Beats. Along with
Ken Kesey and Tom Robbins, Brautigan resonated with the Love Generation, Trout
Fishing alone selling over 2 million copies. Although Brautigan
disdained the “hippie rejection of the work ethic”, and held this slightly
younger generation in contempt as “bean sprout eaters . . . granola heads!”,
in the 1970s they made him rich and famous.

Trout Fishing in America was met with “rushing laudatory torrents”, but
widespread acclaim would always elude Brautigan. One evident aim of
Hjortsberg’s book is to counter Brautigan’s detractors and install his
subject as a major American author in the pantheon of Brautigan’s heroes:
“Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson”.
Brautigan certainly believed himself deserving of such laurels: “I’ve been
thinking recently”, he told a friend in the early 1970s, “I’ve got a good
shot at the Nobel Prize”. But the sceptics were many. It would remain
difficult for Brautigan to escape Robert Duncan’s verdict, that he was
nothing more than “a talented stand-up entertainer”. In the later phase of
his career, Brautigan would get on stage to read a poem titled “Fuck Me Like
Fried Potatoes”.

Hjortsberg’s effort to reverse the verdict sometimes causes him to
overcompensate by including statements that inflate Brautigan’s
significance. The writer’s ex-wife, for example, says, “He really created a
new form . . . . Which was a prose poem”, a statement Baudelaire, Mallarmé
and Rimbaud would have something to say about, and Hjortsberg should, too.
Whenever Brautigan receives a negative review, Hjortsberg has the critics
“sniff[ing]”, “carp[ing]”, or “sneer[ing]”, with the TLS
“howl[ing] at the head of the pack”. But while there are surely many hatchet
artists amid “the honking gaggle of newspaper hacks”, Hjortsberg overreaches
himself when he lists Julian Barnes among “the usual array of naysayers”.
The reader is compelled to scepticism, as one suspects such amplification
would be unnecessary, were Brautigan’s eminence self-evident.

Brautigan always carried the seed of alcoholism, but success enabled it to
flourishBrautigan always carried the seed of alcoholism, but success
enabled it to flourish. Jubilee Hitchhiker becomes a story of decline
when Brautigan builds a house outside Livingston, Montana – “twenty-four
bars and an equal number of churches” – to live among a macho milieu of hard
drinkers, gunslingers and philanderers including Thomas McGuane, Peter
Fonda, Jimmy Buffett and William “Gatz” Hjortsberg himself, whose property
was adjacent to Brautigan’s. “For narrative purposes”, Hjortsberg here
inserts himself into his book in the third person, a technique that goes
from strange to stranger. At first, the reader is only slightly bothered, as
Hjortsberg writes of Richard’s “admiration for Gatz”, how he “praised
Hjortsberg’s writing”; but when Hjortsberg and his wife Marian begin having
“marital problems”, and we learn that “It wasn’t long before he
[Brautigan] and Marian became lovers”, the material has certainly become the
first-person’s domain.

Without the hippies, Brautigan struggled to accomplish “the dewhimsicalizing
of his literary reputation”. An attempt to write five genre novels in five
years didn’t help, generating only his laziest books, which even Hjortsberg
quickly passes over. “Students, always his fan base before, no longer seemed
to know who he was.” He experienced a steep drop in income, exacerbated by
his relentless drinking and frequent stays in Tokyo, “the erotic capital of
planet Earth”. He reacted to all criticism defensively or with
self-aggrandizing claims: “There are those who say ‘Richard Brautigan sits
down in an hour and a half and writes his annual bestseller’ . . . [but] I
work very, very hard to make things appear very, very simple”. Guns assumed
a central, almost fetishistic significance, alienating everyone except
perhaps the director Sam Peckinpah, with whom Brautigan shot at alley cats
from a hotel window. A less enthused filmmaker was Wim Wenders, who once had
to “literally escape” Brautigan, who was “aiming at him, drunk and
confused”. He became every host’s nightmare: “One, he brought uninvited
guests. Two, he was already drunk. Three, he had a .357 Magnum with him”.

Faced with the financial fallout from a dwindling audience, and socially
isolated by alcoholism, Brautigan abandoned Montana and withdrew to an
“ultragloomy” house in Bolinas. There he seems to have perfected his
loneliness: “Richard was ready to die”. No reader will warm to Brautigan’s
behaviour, but as Jubilee Hitchhiker moves towards its inevitable
conclusion, one is left with the strange tenderness that surely compelled
Hjortsberg – an eventual enemy – to undertake writing this book. At his
best, Brautigan was “a connoisseur of the perfect moment”, with a talent for
“coaxing something amusing from the mundane”. When the Apollo 17 astronauts
discovered a small crater on the Moon, they named it Shorty after a
character from Trout Fishing in America. One can conceive of no finer
tribute to an authentic American lunatic.

Michael LaPointe is a writer and literary journalist in Vancouver,
British Columbia.